Recovery: Life After Bipolar Disorder-How Ken Jensen Manages Wellness

The recovery years directly after bipolar disorder were filled with prolific writing for me.

I wanted to make clear all that I’d survived, now that I had some sanity and perspective.

I wrote all these arts during 2007-2008

You’ll notice how I had more of a flow state to my writing, which was how my head was working then.

Lotta long sentences broken up with a lot of commas. Smooth transitions were sometimes non-existent.

Because…

Recovery meant less intense or less episodes of mania, not an end to it

I’ve always been a bit wired for sound at all times, and I’ve come to understand that this can be its own normal, not to be confused with a symptom of bipolar.

Back to the articles…

The word choice was often cruder and punchier. It reflects the Younger Me quite well. Nothing wrong with that. It was what it was. But I’ve smoothed out my approach a hair.

I was still a hyper-fast thinker at this time too, with a volume of info I found hard to meter out in small batches.

Little has changed there. I just became a better editor. 😉

In that vein, I cleaned up some of the material below to help make the points clearer. And hopefully to add some semblance of logic to each article’s story line.

But it’s about 95% just as it was first written.

It gives you an idea of what my mind in recovery was like as wellness took hold

This is a period that can be filled with hope, or one that causes more trauma in the form of unmanageable new experiences. The “newness” can send some people running straight back the way they came, as that’s a known entity and less frightening.

Matter of fact, one of the articles addresses this very fact.

So, it’s important for all the players to see what may be coming for them, in order to react and adapt accordingly.

These writings also show you how my writing’s improved, for those of you looking to maybe share your own messages with the world one day.

Passion alone will not be enough to create a well received message, regardless of intent.

People need to be able to grasp what you’re saying, picture themselves using what you share, and trusting that you are the one they should be following to do so.

Tall order and one I am constantly fighting to improve upon.

So why did I really write all these words, way back then?

The point of all of this material was to talk about bipolar from the stance of one who’s beaten it–something I’d seen little of during my research years.

Someone in active recovery.
Without meds and without symptoms.

Not COPED with it. REMOVED it.

I also wanted to help the non-mentally ill come to understand a little better what bipolar disorder felt like.
And I wanted the ones who were in it to see that I knew where they were coming from.

But this is my past

I no longer focus exclusively on the role bipolar played in my life. Doing so had led me down some unforeseeably tricky roads and gained me more problems than positives.

However, I wanted to leave the info available for any who needed it, while allowing myself room to keep growing and increase the scope of who I helped.

So I adjusted my approach to fold my bipolar experiences and lessons into a broader approach; one that lets me help not only bipolar people, but also those who are hurting, yet not in such peril.

People who might even be experiencing their own recovery from something else entirely, yet wish to know someone, somewhere made it out of some sort of shit in one piece, thereby giving them hope that they might too.

Because if I walked away (so to speak) from the list of problems below, imagine what I might be able to help you overcome!